Play, Voluntary Discipline and Protocols of Improvisation

When American playwright and actor Sam Shepard first arrived in New York City in 1963, he hoped to find work as a musician. Shepard claims he was inspired to write when he and Charles Mingus Jr. (the jazz composer's son) worked as busboys at the Village Gate:

...we heard some great shit down there. Nina Simone, in a crazy wig, Monk, the Adderley Brothers, Mingus. Incredible. Woody Allen was doing stand-up comedy with Flip Wilson; they'd get up there and open the show. But jazz...that changed me. And I wasn't there long before I started to write. (Hamill 88)

In his important artistic statement "Language, Visualization and the Inner Library" (1975), Shepard confesses that the reason he began writing "was the hope of extending the sensation of play (as in "kid") on into adult life." (214) While the reference to the play of children may seem disingenuous for a playwright of Shepard's stature, the notion is worth exploring along a number of trajectories. One of the great practitioners of theatrical improvisation in the twentieth century, Jacques Copeau, associated the "essence of the dramatic personality" with "the child who,in sheer bodily delight, jumps and shouts for joy on a spring morning: that is where to find the origin of exultation" (5). It may need to be clarified that Copeau promoted "the art of improvisation and the illusion of spontaneity" (155) in his actors, and that I am concerned here with play and improvisation as an activity that can be performed before an audience, with a "pre-established form which is inspirational" in Copeau's terms (158).

This focus on "performative-consciousness" (Schechner) draws attention to the need to keep the open-ended structures of improvisation safe for the performers or players. Richard Schechner comments: "Because performances are usually subjunctive, liminal, dangerous, and duplicitous they are often hedged in with conventions and frames: ways of making the places, the participants, and the events somewhat safe. In these relatively safe make-believe precincts, actions can be carried to extremes, even for fun" (xiv). Joseph Chaikin--a long-time friend and associate of Shepard's, and one of the founders of the Open Theatre--calls this adoption of conventions and frames a "voluntary discipline" and necessary: "Because of the way things are in this country, we often act out of a dictate that has nothing to do with ourselves. We must not take that into our work, for, if we do, we won't be able to recognize our own impulses..." (80) Paradoxically, so it seems, voluntary discipline liberates the impulses of the performer for purposes of self-discovery, not self-indulgence, and has the added advantage of keeping the performance space safe for both performers and audience alike.

Schechner's description of performative consciousness is influenced by the work of anthropologist Victor Turner who conceived of play as a liminal, or threshold-crossing experience: in play, we combine what we have at hand--what is, the indicative function-with what could be--the subjunctive, or provisional function (From Ritual to Theatre 28). For example, we might take a stick or a pencil and play as if it were a sword. We make paper airplanes. We are bricoleurs. In so doing, we participate in an activity which is highly engaging cognitively since we are integrating analytical and associative mental processes. In his essay "Body, Brain and Culture," Turner draws on the work of neurophysiologists to speculate that "at the neurobiological level play might have something to do with the sensitization of neural structures of an interface type, like the limbic system at the core of the brain..." (167) He is, however, reluctant to fix the location of play, preferring to focus instead on it as a process: "Play can be everywhere and nowhere, imitate anything, yet be identified with nothing...products of both hemispheres are juxtaposed and intermingled." These "ludic" or free and spontaneous recombinations--what Jencks and Silver term ad-hocism as an aesthetic mode--are the essence of play, and are associated by Turner with the pan-cultural archetype of the trickster: Hermes, Loki, Eshu-Elegbara, Papa Legba, the Signifying Monkey, Raven, and Coyote among others.

As a messenger conveying riddles between humans and the forces of the cosmos, the trickster is nomadic, playful, ambiguous, all in the service of challenging the status quo. In his wonderful book on the trickster archetype, Lewis Hyde claims that the "trickster myth derives creative intelligence from appetite. It begins with a being whose main concern is getting fed and it ends with the same being grown mentally swift, adept at creating and unmasking deceit, proficient at hiding his tracks and at seeing through the devices used by others to hide theirs. Trickster starts out hungry, but before long he is master of the kind of creative deception that, according to a long tradition, is a prerequisite of art" (17). The trickster signifies a transformational potential in culture, the healing power of play, and the hazards of constraining the self.

As if taking their cues from the acting exercise known as "transformations" (Carlson Theories 420; Cohn 251; Spolin), Sam Shepard's characters are saddled with the compulsion to refashion themselves. Bonnie Marranca writes that the transformational character developed by the Open Theatre has a "fluid relationship to changing 'realities'." Unlike the characters in "realistic" drama who chase "the illusory ideal of definition," she suggests that Shepard's characters play "fragments, gaps, transformations--the breaks in continuity" (14). One of Shepard's significant gifts as a playwright is his ability to dramatize these points of turbulence: from the earliest one-act plays presented on Off-Off-Broadway in 1964 to the more recent Simpatico (1995) and the stories of Cruising Paradise (1996), Shepard portrays characters who improvise their identities within a matrix of constraints, whether these constraints be cultural, familial, or personal. Shepard's stage is a temporary autonomous zone (Bey) where the nomadic character, who may appear to be "unfixed" (DeRose), "fragmented" (Bigsby), or in a "state of crisis" (Bottoms), is given an opportunity to perform with voice and gesture on the theme of the self.

An extreme situation is presented in Suicide in Bb (1976), where the "outside" jazz musician Niles returns inside to his apartment, the scene of his mysterious murder-or is it suicide?--where he seems justifiably troubled to find the outline of his missing body chalked onto the floor of his apartment: "It's not so easy to leave a life," he confesses. "It's not the easiest thing in the world. I can still smell myself in this place. It feels like I never left....What if it turns out to be harder playing dead than it was playing alive?" (210) This is as much a dilemma for the actor playing Niles--somewhere on the border of dead and alive--as we imagine it to be for Niles the character. Marranca asserts that "What usually happens in the theatre is that the actor is given the opportunity to be a character. Shepard reverses the practice by giving his characters the chance to be performers" (14). Niles the outside jazz musician doesn't want either his music or his self pinned down:

What's everyone waiting for? Are you here to arrest me? Is that it? In my own house? Am I dead or alive? Is that it? Is this me here, now? Are these questions or answers? Are you waiting for the truth to roll out and lap your faces like a bloodhound's tongue? Are you diving to the bottom of it? Getting to the core of the mystery?....Waiting for one wrong move when they're all wrong moves? (229)

At the heart of Shepard's dramatic practice is an on-going exploration of the realms of the self (Ganz) situated in the landscape of consciousness. Reflecting on his early years as an Off-Off-Broadway playwright, experimenting with drugs, influenced by the politics of the Vietnam War era, Shepard wrote that the main idea which persists for him from that time is "the idea of consciousness" ("American Experimental Theatre" 212). In this, Shepard alludes to the self-reflexive quality of experimental theatre--plays about theatre, plays about play, plays about performing a role: Lynda Hart uses the term "metatheatre" to describe the stage when it becomes a "metaphor for consciousness" (Hart 14-15). Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author , or Truffault's film Day for Night are archetypes of the metatheatrical mode.

Gary Grant suggests that Shepard's extensive notebook collection in the Boston University Library archives demonstrate how the act of writing is for Shepard a "performance of the self," something he passes on to his characters: "...they create a shifting sense of self which their potential for transformation is capable of performing" (561). One of the exciting discoveries I made while researching the Shepard archives in Boston was his interest in the Russian philosopher Georges Gurdjieff, subject of Peter Brook's film Meetings with Remarkable Men. Gurdjieff used the symbol of the enneagram--a nine-pointed figure inscribed within a circle--to map the human psyche according to Pythagorean notions of harmonious musical scales (see Bennett). Gurdjieff believed that we all carry the potential for many characters within ourselves. We adopt a repertoire of character traits to adjust to changing circumstance. In many respects, Shepard's work can be seen as an exploration of this notion that we are each many characters traveling through the domains of consciousness, and that these characters are related in a manner analogous to musical harmonies. Shepard writes: "The age-old idea is that a character evolves along a line, and any deviation from that has to be explained somehow. But I feel there are many voices in a person, many different people in one person, so why shouldn't they have a chance to come out" (qtd. in Chaikin & Shepard 27).

Shepard's notion of character evolved considerably, especially after his encounter with Peter Brook in London in the early 1970's. However, from the beginning, it was his intuition as a playwright that characters were not untrue when illogical, incoherent, or excessively reactive. A "Note to the Actors" in Angel City (1976) sums up this attitude:

The term "character" could be thought of in a different way when working on this play. Instead of the idea of a "whole character" with logical motives behind his behavior which the actor submerges himself into, he should consider instead a fractured whole with bits and pieces of character flying off the central theme. In other words, more in terms of collage or jazz improvisation. (62)

I make an adjustment. I'm basically geared in the old forms. Pre-bop, Lester Young, Roscoe Holcombe. I could run a list of hip references to make your tail swim. I've connived in the deepest cracks of the underground. Rubbed knuckles with the nastiest poets. Done the "Rocky Mountain Back Step" in places where they've outlawed bubble gum. But that's neither here nor there....The point is I've smelled something down here. Something sending its sweet claws way up North.

By the end of the play, Rabbit Brown has been reshaped by the power he seeks: his skin turns slimy green, he has fangs, long black fingernails, and a thick mane of black hair. In dramatizing this radical transformation of character, Shepard simultaneously satirizes the business and power of Hollywood, and asks his audience to reflect on the degree to which notions of the self are invented, adopted, tried on, performed, and abandoned.

Many critics have seen this conception of the performing character--of those who "act themselves out" like Rabbit Brown in Angel City, or Niles in Suicide in Bb--as indicative of absurdist or postmodern malaise (see Bigsby or Frutkin for example). For Shepard, however, the improvising character is clearly more "realistic" than the coherent constructs of psychological realism. Consistency and coherence are not necessarily qualities we look for in such characters. Rather, as with jazz soloists, we look for "chops": attitude, authenticity, responsiveness, qualities of voice and expression, awareness of the ensemble and social occasion, knowledge of the tradition and use of vernacular, and an aptitude for the confessional. These "protocols of improvisation" (Soules 1994) function as voluntary constraints or guidelines which ground the performance of character, or music, on stage, as they do the presentations of self in everyday life (Goffman). In his monumental Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, Paul Berliner quotes Wynton Marsalis: "Jazz is not just, 'Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.' It's a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study" (63). Improvisation, in other words, has certain protocols or conventions which provide a context for the greater freedom of spontaneous invention.

Protocols--"long-established codes" determining "precedence and precisely correct procedure"--may at first seem antithetical to notions of freedom implied by improvisation. However, improvisation typically occurs either within, or in close relation to, voluntary constraints. Protocols, as voluntary constraints or strategies--agreements which "glue" events together-- ground the play of improvisation in performance situations. Such a reconciliation of freedom and constraint is aptly demonstrated by Jack Kerouac's improvised haikus. Kerouac imagined himself to be a "jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session" (Mexico City Blues). Another perspective is provided by novelist Ralph Ellison. Claiming that he "had learned from the jazz musicians I had known as a boy in Oklahoma City something of the discipline and devotion" required to play jazz, Ellison elaborates on the requisite attitude:

I had learned too that the end of all this discipline and technical mastery was the desire to express an affirmative way of life through its musical tradition and that this tradition insisted that each artist achieve his creativity within its frame. He must learn the best of the past, and add to it his personal vision. Life could be harsh, loud and wrong if it wished, but they lived it fully, and when they expressed their attitude toward the world it was with a fluid style that reduced the chaos of living to form. ("Living with Music," 189-90)

In a similar vein, musicologist John Miller Chernoff sums up one of the fundamental principles of African performative improvisation:

Those who have pressed us to recognize the achievements of extemporaneous improvisation have often underemphasized the importance of organization to the critical aesthetic sense. Ultimately, precise and impressive control of improvisational style distinguishes excellence in African musical idioms, and the worst mistake in such a context is not participatory restraint but random expression.(122)

... is another word for the perception of relationships, a dynamic aesthetic attitude which focuses the music on the occasion. ...The formal and traditional relationships are respected not necessarily because they contain any specific meaning but because it is the musical arrangement which provides the possibility for comprehensible improvisation. The formal relationships are vitalized and enhanced in good music, but the musical form is open rather than rigid, set up so it affords a focus for the expression of individuality that subtly distinguishes an occasion within the context of tradition. (126)

Above, we read the words of characters who, in typical Shepard fashion trope on clichés and cultural references. This troping--or linguistic play--has analogies to extended jazz "riffs" as defined by Albert Murray in Stompin' the Blues:

When they are effective, riffs always seem as spontaneous as if they were improvised in the heat of the performance. So much so that riffing is sometimes regarded as being synonymous with improvisation. But such is not always the case by any means. Not only are riffs as much a part of some arrangements and orchestrations as the lead melody, but many consist of nothing more than stock phrases, quotations from some familiar melody, or even clichés that just happen to be popular at the moment....[I]mprovisation includes spontaneous appropriation (or inspired allusion, which sometimes is a form of signifying) no less than on-the-spot invention. (96)

In his marvelous book The Signifying Monkey, Louis Henry Gates Jr. explores a related notion of improvisation in which the performer "repeats and revises" musical figures, styles, and instrumental voices. Gates associates this activity with the African American practice of "signifyin(g)"--playing with linguistic figures to parody or pastiche a rival (46). It is no coincidence that Gates associates this signifyin(g) practice with the trickster archetype and, incidentally, with the practice of cultural and literary criticism.

Shepard's wild rock 'n roll play, The Tooth of Crime can be read as a signifying match-a contest of words and wits--between the aging rock star Hoss and the predatory upstart Crow, who distinguishes himself with his "unheard-of tongue." When Hoss wants to know what the Gypsy Killers think of the stars, like him, Crow cackles, "Image shots are blown, man. No fuse to match the hole. Only power forces weigh the points in our match." Hoss, surprisingly, seems to understand this "argot": "You mean we're just ignored? Nobody's paying attention?" Crow is quick to let him know just how out-of-touch Hoss has become: "We catch debris beams from your set. We scope it to our action then send it back to garbage game." Hoss is no match for the pesky upstart whose main attribute, it turns out, is his ability "to switch to suit." Hoss can't give up his attachment to a self-image that he is no longer in control of. Shepard writes of this play:

The character Crow in Tooth of Crime came from a yearning toward violence. A totally lethal human with no way or reason for tracing how he got that way. He just appeared. He spit words that became his weapons....When you're writing inside of a character like this, you aren't pausing every ten seconds to figure out what it all means. If you do, you lose the whole shot, because the character isn't going to hang around waiting for you. He's moving. (Language 218)

Shepard's ability to follow the voices of characters without interference and hesitation owes a debt to Jack Kerouac's method of "jazz-sketching" with words. Shepard describes spontaneous bop prosody as, "Following the exact same principles as a musician does when he's jamming" (Language 217). He suggests that the extent to which he can "actually follow the picture and not intervene with [his] two-cents worth is where inspiration and craftsmanship hold their real meaning" (215).

In his early plays at least, he shared Kerouac's suspicion of revision and craft, preferring instead to privilege spontaneity and movement: "Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image" ("Essentials of Spontaneous Prose"). During its composition, a Shepard play is "an open-ended structure where anything could happen as opposed to a carefully planned and regurgitated event." When a character like Crow is moving, the playwright needs a method such as jazz-sketching that can trace the action.

That character may be identified or located by voice (see articles by Wren) may be approached profitably in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin's notions of dialogism, multivocality, and heteroglossia. Such an approach to Shepard's work is taken by Leslie Wade, for example, who defines heteroglossia as "a plurality of voices and impulses" embodied simultaneously in discourse: "a cultural phenomenon in which outbursts of anarchy, multiplicity, and difference challenge the dominant culture and its 'legitimate' discursive forms" (3). Improvisation--a phenomenon of the ensemble, the tribe, the band, the multiple self--allows space for unique individual voices and styles within a collective performance. Marvin Carlson suggests that the "creative tension between repetition and innovation" implied by Bakhtin's dialogic model "is deeply involved in modern views of performance" (58).

A great deal more could be said about this matrix of ideas touching on play, voluntary discipline, and the protocols of improvisation. I have tried to suggest that our notions of character, the self, and community are centrally implicated in any consideration of improvisation for performance. Improvisation is above all about having a dialogue, a conversation, for purposes of liberation. In his recent study of the "culture of spontaneity," Daniel Belgrad claims that in "the most successful improvisational art, the give-and-take of conversation functions as a model of democratic interaction. He quotes musician Ann Farber to illustrate: "No single instrumentalist or structure establishes absolute dominance," writes Farber of her music making. "Instead voices and structures keep weaving in and out, modifying and reshaping one another" (2). Just so. As with music, so with the self inside community.

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---. "American Experimental Theatre: Then and Now." Performing Arts Journal 2 (Fall 1977). Rpt. American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard. Ed. Bonnie Marranca. New York: PAJ Publications, 1981. 212-13.

---. Cruising Paradise. New York: Knopf, 1996.

---. Fool For Love and Other Plays. New York: Bantam, 1984.

---. "Language, Visualization and the Inner Library." The Drama Review 21 (Dec. 1977). Rpt. in American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard. Ed. Bonnie Marranca. New York: PAJ Publications, 1981. 214-19.

---. Seven Plays. New York: Bantam, 1981.

---. Suicide in Bb. Fool For Love and Other Plays. 191-230.

---. The Tooth of Crime. Seven Plays. 201-251.

Soules, Marshall. Sam Shepard Improvises. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 1994.

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---. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ, 1982.

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Wren, Scott Christopher. "Camp Shepard: Exploring the Geography of Character." West Coast Plays 7 (Fall 1980): 73-103.

---. "Duck Hunting in Marin: On the Second Shepard Workshop." West Coast Plays 11/12 (Winter/Spring 1982): 210-19.